How Extreme US Cold, a Trump Tweet & Little Ice Age Chatter Triggered A Warmist Meltdown

Global warming works in mysterious ways apparently and it is a wonder to behold the triggered, hypocritical, general dumbness and crass stupidity which its workings have on this occasion provoked among the Warmist classes – with a little help from the tweet of a certain Donald T. I’ve seen dumber responses from the AGW crowd, but I really can’t remember when.

So yes, it’s cold – very cold, record-breakingly cold – in America and Canada right now and this is making the people who regularly feed us a diet of unrelenting global warming propaganda just a teensy bit uncomfortable, especially those who reside in Canada and the Eastern United States, who now know what a wind chill of -55C feels like, something which is unknowable to many of us here in Western Europe.

But not to be deterred from keeping the warmist flame burning, even in the midst of an historically cold winter, they have taken to Twitter and the MSM to explain, variously, why ‘it’s just weather innit’, to elucidate for the benefit of us climate-challenged ignoramuses the difference between weather and climate and finally, to explain how, yes, in certain circumstances, global warming doesn’t mean just extreme heat, but can mean extreme cold too. I have only skimmed the surface of this fount of Warmist wisdom regurgitated very recently onto social media post the appearance of the dreaded 2017 polar vortex, but I do have some nuggets to present to our bewildered and naive Cliscep readers. Hopefully thus, they – and maybe even Trump if he deigns to alight here at our humble domain – will finally come to understand the difference between extreme cold, which is weather (except sometimes when it’s not), climate (which is NCDC/GISS global mean surface temperature data usually, but can be literally anything) and extreme heat (which is almost always due to ‘climate change’, aka global warming).

Firstly however, I want to talk about Little Ice Ages – which residents in Eastern USA and Canada might reasonably be forgiven for thinking they’re in, right now. Specifically I want to talk briefly about THE Little Ice Age (a generally cold period extending from the 12th century to the 19th century) and the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) and a ‘new Little Ice Age’ which apparently some scientists warn is nigh and will “freeze the Thames over”. Why? Because the MSM has been promoting it very recently, rehashing old research, in a manner not dissimilar to the way in which they promote global warming scares, i.e. misleading headlines and poorly presented half-information. The research in question is Valentina Zharkova’s 2015 paper on solar polar magnetic fields which, at the time, provoked ‘lively’ debate in climate circles. Discussion here at Tallbloke. I’m not sure why this story is doing the rounds again, but it’s topical, with the current extreme cold in Canada and the US. It would seem that Sky News decided to interview Zharkova and this is what they reported.